Editorial: Not enough reason to snoop on reporters

In this May 15, 2013, file photo U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, the nation's top law enforcement official, pauses while testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington. Holder told the committee that a serious national security leak required the secret gathering of telephone records at The Associated Press. The Department's latest effort to examine who journalists are talking to highlights that government investigators are guided more by policy and the discretion of high-ranking officials than by specific laws or, in this case, any need to satisfy an independent federal judge. J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE, ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE PHOTO

One needn't be a fan of Fox News to find troubling the revelation that the Obama Justice Department obtained telephone and email records of James Rosen, the cable network's chief Washington correspondent, who authored a 2009 article on North Korea that reportedly included classified information.

The Washington Post, which broke the story, reported that Mr. Rosen is suspected by federal investigators of receiving the secret material from Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a State Department security adviser now facing federal prosecution.

In addition to tracing the timing of Mr. Rosen's calls, and perusing his personal emails, the Justice Department also tracked his visits to the State Department by reviewing records culled from his access badge.

Now, we do not believe the government's investigation of Mr. Rosen, whose employer generally is considered to bend toward political conservatism, is related to the recent revelation that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status.

But there clearly are similarities in the Justice Department's surreptitious acquisition of Mr. Rosen's phone and email records and its secret subpoena of phone records of Associated Press journalists, as reported last week.

The revelations suggest that the Obama Justice Department does not take seriously the First Amendment's protection of freedom of the press. They also suggest that Justice has identified friendly magistrates all too willing to rubber stamp its requests for search warrants and subpoenas.

Indeed, while announcing that he had previously recused himself from the Justice Department's investigation of a possible leak of top-secret information to AP, Attorney General Eric Holder nonetheless justified the Justice Department's seizure of AP phone records on grounds that the alleged leak "put the American people at risk."

Of course, that claim can be the pretext for government surveillance of any journalist who has sources at Justice or State – or the CIA, the National Security Agency, Homeland Security or any other government agency with a security function.

The Justice Department doesn't think it crossed any lines. In a statement, it maintained that in the cases of both Mr. Rosen and the Associated Press, it scrupulously observed "all applicable laws, regulations, and longstanding Department of Justice policies intended to safeguard the First Amendment interests" of both the media and the public.

We disagree. And we concur with First Amendment attorney Charles Tobin, who told the Washington Post that search warrants for private communications of working journalists "have a chilling effect on the free flow of important information to the public."

Even during time of war, with the United States under attack from a foreign government, the government should not have the power to suspend with impunity the First Amendment. That is all the more so during peacetime.

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